


Let in the Dark

by lacking



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Action, Emotional Baggage, F/F, F/M, Foursome - F/F/M/M, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, References to Past Child Abuse, characters accidently triggering each other, lots of sex?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-15
Updated: 2013-06-15
Packaged: 2017-12-15 02:32:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/844301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lacking/pseuds/lacking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce fumbles with control. Tony, Natasha, and Pepper try to help. Foursomes and espionage go down on the side.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let in the Dark

It’s always been about control.

(because Bruce has never had control. Bruce has had his Father’s hands tightening around his throat and his Mother’s slick blood blooming at the corner of her lips. He’s had Betty’s haunted eyes and splinters of bone wedged beneath his nails and mindless, helpless, rage that makes him want to dig his fingers deep into his own skin and _pull_.)

“You can control it,” Tony says.

Bruce takes off his glasses and pinches his fingers into the corners of his eyes.

“Not well enough.”

 

*

 

_Fury pushes a folder across the table. Bruce doesn’t look down at it._

_“What’s this?”_

_“The same thing I’ve been e-mailing you for weeks.”_

_“Maybe it’s getting sent to junk.”_

_“Banner.” Fury places one hand against the tabletop, standing at an angle so he can focus on Bruce with his single eye. His right index finger is tapping a steady rhythm into the desk, but his tone remains even when he says, “Trust me, you’re going to want to see this.”_

_Bruce snorts at the word ‘trust’. He flips open the file, skimming through half of the first page before he has to force himself to stop, breathe, and start over again._

_Fury gives him two minutes before interrupting: “We don’t know the extent of the experimentation or where he’s being kept. We need to send someone else in, someone who’s familiar with Ross and who knows what information we need to be looking for, the kind of code or jargon he would use for something like this.”_

_“I’m not the most qualified for stealth.”_

_“No.”_

_Bruce looks up at Fury from over the rim of his glasses._

_Fury says, “But you want in.”_

_Fury is an honest man in his own twisted way. He doesn’t try to hide his smirk, to keep his tone sharp and professional instead of allowing it to warm with the prospect of victory. He shows Bruce what a smug fuck he really is and relishes in it, and Bruce would hate it if he didn’t hate being lied to even more._

_Bruce breathes out and sets the file back onto the desk. He rubs his hands together to keep himself from curling them into fists._

_“What’s the plan?”_

 

*

 

It’s Natasha who approaches him. She rounds a corner in the hallway and steps smoothly into Bruce’s path one night, crossing her arms and cocking her hip just-so. She’s wearing a cream-coloured robe that cuts off just above her knee, and Bruce recognizes it only because he’s seen it wrapped around Pepper’s slim shoulders before.

“We should fuck,” she says.

Bruce has spent the past eighteen hours in the lab dismantling a doombot and trying (failing) to reconstruct it again. Two days before Viktor Von Doom and the Fantastic Four had a throw down in the centre of the city that toppled three buildings. The first of which was a hospital. 

Bruce had been two blocks away, having lunch with Clint when it happened, and hulking out hadn’t been an option because Bruce needed to be pulling people out of the rubble and assisting the medics, not ripping through his clothes and throwing ambulances down the street.

Clint dragged Bruce away from the mess every few hours to force some water into him. Every now and then he would tip up Bruce’s chin, turn his head this way and that to see if he was going green around the gills and making a show of it to prove just how little it actually mattered to him.

“You don’t have to do that,” Bruce said.

“You’re not a machine, Banner.” Clint replied. 

Bruce has slept through six of the past seventy-two hours, so wired that even with exhaustion settling in behind his eyes he can’t seem to do more than doze for twenty minutes at a time. He’s been futzing around in the lab and ignoring Reed’s calls, brushing aside Tony’s offers of assistance. He keeps thinking about India and Brazil, about the walk-in closet in his bedroom and how preferable it would be to just curl up on the floor inside with a blanket, to sleep there instead of in his room where the bed is too comfortable and the walls are too far away.

Frustration prickles under his skin like an itch. 

Natasha is still waiting for an answer. 

“Are Pepper and Tony busy?” Bruce asks. He keeps his tone casual, like he’s questioning her about the weather and not actually being an asshole.

Natasha tilts her head. Her hair gleams red and brown in the low lighting as it tumbles against her cheek. 

“Pepper’s still away on business, and I have no interest in having sex with Stark.”

“Oh,” Bruce says. He clears his throat. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed—”

Natasha lifts a shoulder. “Easy assumption to make. I guess.” 

“It’s none of my business.”

“It’s fine.”

“I was being a jerk.”

“I know.”

Bruce nods. Natasha doesn’t move. He lets his eyes drift away from her face as he smiles sheepishly. He pulls his eyebrows up and in, digs his toe into the lush carpet and makes a vague gesture at the hallway behind her. _Now that I’ve thoroughly embarrassed myself, may I please be excused?_

It tends to work for him, this little act. It makes people think that he’s shy, makes them feel awkward and guilty for pestering him to socialize.

Natasha just snorts. When he glances back at her she’s not quite grinning, but she sounds amused when she says, “Are you kidding me with this?”

Bruce sighs. “Why the offer, exactly?”

“It looks like you could use it. Stress relief.”

“Stress is fine. I can handle stress. I think I’ve mentioned something about that before.”

“Yeah, but I’m under the impression that a lot of what you say is bullshit.”

Bruce smiles, just the corner of his mouth slanting upwards. He tries not to let his gaze linger on Natasha’s bare throat, the low cut of her robe or the way that the silk flows smoothly over the curve of her waist.

“Probably not as much as you think,” he says. “And ‘looking like I could use it’? Is that code for offering me a pity fuck?”

Natasha stares at him. It strikes Bruce, not for the first time, how soft she looks without seeming delicate at all, something about the contrast between her full lips and hard jaw, her large, nearly doe-like eyes that reveal nothing. 

She says, “I feel nothing resembling pity towards you, Bruce.”

“Okay.” Bruce runs his tongue along his bottom lip. “Okay, good.”

“But I am horny. And you’re cute. So.”

“Natasha, I –I’m flattered. Really. But I can’t be your first choice for this.”

“I don’t see why not.”

Bruce pushes his glasses further up his nose and rubs his hands together. He parts them in an arch. A neat, helpless gesture. “I could make you a list. Pages on pages.”

“Bruce.” Natasha takes a step closer. She smells like soap and Pepper’s perfume and Bruce could hate himself for wanting her.

“You think too much,” she tells him. 

They go back to Natasha’s room. It’s nearly twice the size of Bruce’s quarters, which doesn’t surprise him. Bruce likes small, enclosed spaces, likes being able to see the room from every angle no matter where he chooses to stand.

He looks at the back of Natasha’s neck and pictures her in a firefight, building momentum as she moves from one target to the next, curving around them like a gymnast or a dancer, and understands why she would never find the same comfort in tight walls or low ceilings. 

Natasha stops in front of the bed, turns and reaches for the front of Bruce’s pants. Bruce shakes his head and touches her wrist.

“Can I— can I just take care of you?”

He feels ridiculous. Natasha is young and beautiful and she could snap his neck like a dried twig if she wanted to, flip him over and plant her forearm on his throat until his vision blacked out. She’s damaged, fractured, _cracked_ , but has so carefully knitted herself back together that Bruce could almost envy her. No matter how often Bruce shudders back into his body there’s always a piece that he seems to leave behind, bits of himself that trail back to the moment when he first strapped himself to a chair and gave the lab techs the signal to go ahead with the experiment.

Natasha laughs at him, but not unkindly. She looks like she’s been pleasantly surprised, maybe even a little charmed.

“If you insist, Doctor. But we’re both getting naked first.”

Bruce hadn’t been planning on anything else. He starts unbuttoning his shirt as Natasha unties her robe, letting it slip off her shoulders and pool at her feet. She’s naked beneath it, and Bruce fumbles when he tries to undo his cuffs. 

“Would you like some help?” Natasha asks sweetly. Instead of reaching for his sleeves she takes Bruce’s arms and wraps them around her waist so he can continue fiddling with his cuffs behind her back. She undoes Bruce’s shirt and trails her hands over the hair on his chest and stomach, scraping her nails against his skin before dipping her fingers below the waistline of his jeans.

She pulls away and sits on the bed when Bruce finally manages to shrug off his shirt. When he’s naked he drops to his knees, pushes her legs apart and buries his face between them. He licks into her until Natasha’s thighs are pressed flushed to his cheeks, the strong muscles in her legs tightening and relaxing. She touches the side of Bruce’s face, drawing her fingers across his cheekbone before curling them into his hair. 

Bruce nearly pulls away, his stubble scrapping against her skin as his head jerks back. 

“What wrong?” Natasha asks, nails scratching lightly against his scalp.

“Nothing,” he says, and sucks a bruise into her hip as Natasha pets him.

She sighs when she comes, sweat gleaming on her throat and chest. Bruce closes his eyes, resting his forehead against the bend of her knee. Natasha doesn’t move her hands away from his hair.

He feels steadier than he has in weeks.

 

*

 

Tony steals the plans to Fury’s Hulk Containment Pod and builds one of his very own, deep underground beneath the tower. He rolls his eyes and hums and haws but still adds a tranquilizing system at Bruce’s insistence.

“You can trigger transformations,” Tony says. There’s no available footage of Bruce becoming the Hulk, but there’s a ten second video up on youtube where the Hulk turns his back towards the camera and there’s a patch of skin on his shoulder that’s still visibly flesh-toned. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it type of thing. Tony has the clip on repeat, and watches it instead of Bruce. 

“Yeah,” Bruce says. He takes off his glasses and rubs at them with the hem of his shirt. “But that’s not control.”

“Then what is?”

“When something else triggers it. I need to be able to —to come back.”

Tony pauses the video. “You’re talking about the helicarrier.”

Bruce thinks of Natasha’s white face gleaming with sweat. He thinks of her dark eyes and the soft way her voice shook when she said his name. _Bruce?_

“I want to be able to stop in the middle of a transformation and reverse it.”

“Huh.” Tony touches his toes to the floor and swings his swivel chair back and forth. He kicks off the ground and spins, faces Bruce completely. “Have you ever done that before?”

_I swear to you, I will get you out of this. You will walk away._

“No.”

 

 

Tony says, “Let’s not push it for the night. C’mon.”

He hooks a hand into the crook of Bruce’s elbow and drags him upstairs for a _Breaking Bad_ marathon. They talk over the show about chemistry until Pepper joins them, back from her trip to California. New freckles have bloomed across her shoulders and arms and her hair is sun bleached, more yellow now than red. She slips out of her heels and takes a seat on the cushion between Bruce and Tony, pressing her lips to the corner of Tony’s mouth before greeting Bruce.

“Doctor.”

“Miss Potts.”

There’s a bowl filled with pomegranate seeds on her lap.

“Um. Ew,” Tony says.

“Bruce likes pomegranates,” Pepper says. Bruce isn’t quite sure how she knows that. He takes a seed when she tilts the bowl towards him.

Tony leans forward so he can catch Bruce’s eye. Bruce offers him an “aw, shucks” smile and pops the seed into his mouth.

“Well,” Tony says. “ _Cleary_ you two are made for each other.”

Pepper smoothes her palm over Tony’s knee. “Oh, you think so too?” 

Bruce starts to doze over the course of the next episode, still weary from the previous day and not really caught up on his sleep.

(Bruce had gone to bed with Natasha and woke up without her, but he wasn’t offended by her absence. He hadn’t meant to drift off while she was still there. He thinks it was kind of her, to lie still while Bruce rested his head on her stomach, waiting as his breathing slowed and his eyelids flickered shut.) 

Pepper smells like sunscreen and salt water and Bruce remembers the abandoned beach house he stayed at for three days off the coast of Nova Scotia. It had been in the fall and the air had been chilled and the water had been cold but Bruce walked barefoot down the beach anyways, wearing a pair of cut-off pants and a heavy sweater. He liked the view of the grey water meeting the open span of the horizon and the numb solitude it offered. 

He stirs when Pepper shifts next to him. Tony says something and Pepper makes a soft sound, and maybe there are fingers ghosting along the back of his neck.

“Go back to sleep,” Tony says.

“’M squishing you,” Bruce murmurs, because at some point he tipped against Pepper’s shoulder and now her arm is caught between her body and his chest. He tries to move, his nose skimming against her throat, and the fingers at his neck find his shoulder. Tighten. 

Pepper says, “It’s okay. You’re not very heavy.”

 

*

 

_“I’ll get you in,” Natasha tells him._

_“Doesn’t have to be you,” Bruce says._

_She gives him a look, eyebrows pulled up, lips slightly downturned. Bruce doesn’t feel stupid, partly because he is a man that very rarely, if ever, feels stupid, and partly because he already knows how redundant that statement was._

_Natasha does nothing that she hasn’t chosen for herself. Bruce offered her a way out because he likes her, because he wants to be polite about the whole thing._

_“Doesn’t have to be you, either,” she says._

_Bruce shakes his head. “No. No, it really does.”_

 

*

 

Tony claps his hands together and rubs his palms back and forth.

“Any ideas on how you want to go about this?”

Bruce considers a tactful, inviting way to say it, and then quickly dismisses the urge to sugar-coat things. “Electric shock?”

Tony’s hands stop moving. He makes a face, wrinkling his nose. 

Bruce draws his tongue over his bottom lip and pretends to look down at something on the monitor. “If you don’t have the stomach for this you should say so now—”

“What? No, it’s fine. I just, I don’t— wouldn’t that be insufficient? Doesn’t this have more to do with emotional crap pushing you to transform?”

“Being tasered doesn’t exactly make me happy.”

“Right, but it also fucks with your heartbeat and stresses your body.”

“Something smaller might work. I had a teacher in Brazil who helped me learn how to control my emotions through breathing. He would slap me.”

Tony drums his fingers against the table and walks towards the pod. Bruce beats him there and punches in the code, the door hissing as it slides open.

The room is almost an exact replica of the one Fury had built for him, except that there was no failsafe device that would send Bruce hurtling thousands of miles towards the ground. Only one wall is translucent, the other three painted a dull white. Tony wants to make it more homely. Furnish it, decorate. Bruce knows this is meant to be a surprise, but he’s already seen the schematics of all the little breakable things Tony is planning on making. 

They move towards the centre of the room. 

“So,” Tony says. His gaze is fixed on a spot over Bruce’s shoulder.

Bruce knows he doesn’t have to say it, but it’s coming out of his mouth anyways: “You need to leave, when I start—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Relax.”

Tony doesn’t move.

Bruce sighs. “Listen—”

Tony backhands him across the face and Bruce’s teeth drag sharply against his tongue as his head snaps to the side. 

Tony hits him again. Once, twice, three times. The third strike draws blood and Tony is stepping away, shaking his head as Bruce touches his thumb to the corner of his lip.

Tony says, “We’re not doing this.” His voice is low and steady, his head slightly bowed.

“You need to wash your hands.”

Tony lifts his eyes. Stares at him.

Bruce says, “My blood, you need—”

“Oh for fuck’s sakes.” Tony turns away.

Bruce watches him go. He looks at the floor and the ceiling, at the bleary reflection of his face in the glass that separates him from the lab. He regrets not mentioning gloves.

He takes a long moment to sift through the rest of what he’s feeling. There’s anger there, pinned down guarded, directed at himself and at Tony who _knew_ what he was getting into, who pounds people into the ground on a daily basis with fists encased in metal, who Bruce shouldn’t have to coddle. 

He considers fanning the spark in his gut into flame, but Tony looks back at him, over his shoulder and through the glass, his expression blank but his eyes dark and wide, and Bruce suddenly feels too tired for it to be worth the effort. 

(Bruce knows the stories about Howard Stark because everyone knows the stories. He knows that Tony’s dad drank too much and cared too little and understands better than most the things that can result in.

He wonders if he should have asked Pepper before going to Tony for help. But then, Tony could have told him, and didn’t. 

Just like Bruce could tell him, too, but doesn’t.)

When Bruce goes back into the lab Tony is at the sink, turning the faucet off and shaking water from his fingers. Bruce passes him a towel.

“You agreed,” Bruce says.

Tony lets out a small puff of air, not looking at him. “Yeah, well. That was probably stupid of me.”

“I don’t know what you were expecting.”

Tony turns to him. He folds the towel over and starts twisting it in his hands, knuckles turning white.

“Why did we forgo the drug cocktail, again?”

“If I can’t get my heart rate back under control it would be pointless.”

“Right.” Tony drops the towel. “We’re trying something else next time.”

 

 

Bruce doesn’t see Tony again for the rest of the day. When he goes upstairs Pepper is in the living room. She looks at him and doesn’t quite frown or sigh. Her face is carefully blank as she gets up from the couch and wanders into the kitchen, pulling out a tray of ice from the freezer.

“That’s not really necessary,” Bruce says, but he’s stepping into the kitchen after her anyways.

Pepper just looks at him, eyebrows lifting upwards. Bruce holds out his hand to take the ice, but she wraps it in a dish towel and touches it to his lip instead.

“He wants to be alone, for awhile,” she tells him. 

Bruce wants to apologize. Tony had known what he was getting into, but Bruce is sorry anyways for Pepper’s neutral expression, for the blood on Tony’s fingers.

“Come sit with me?” Pepper asks. Bruce nods. He takes the ice from her and drops it into the sink. 

“I think it’s important to be open with each other,” Pepper says, crossing her legs at the ankles. “Tony is interested in you, and I don’t mind if you fuck him.” 

Bruce doesn’t say anything.

Pepper smiles. “I also wouldn’t mind if you fucked me. Nat spoke quite highly of you.”

Bruce laughs. Can’t stop himself. “Miss Romanov is too kind.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

Bruce takes Pepper’s hand and kisses the tips of her fingers and the back of her knuckles. There’s a delicacy to Pepper, a gentle poise in the fragility of her wrists and the long, white expanse of her throat that makes Bruce want to worship her, to fall on his knees and press his lips to her ankle.

Pepper takes Bruce’s hand and kisses it in return, the corner of her eyes crinkling in triumph when he laughs again. Her lipstick leaves the red shape of her mouth behind on his skin.

“Is that a yes?” Pepper says.

“Tony will be jealous.”

“He’s already upset that Natasha got to you first.”

Pepper crawls into Bruce’s lap. She pulls the pin from her hair and tosses it over her shoulder.

“It will work in your favour, I promise. Now it’s a competition for him. He’s already talked about how badly he wants to lay you out and just touch you for hours. I think he actually wants you to beg, if that’s something you’re okay with?”

Bruce swallows. Pepper draws a nail across his jaw. 

“Should I tell you more?”

“Please do.”

 

 

“I hate you,” Tony says.

Bruce smirks. He’s confident when he says, “Liar.”

Tony crosses his arms. “It’s not fair. I saw you first.”

“Natasha did, actually.”

“Okay, allow me to clarify: I _wanted_ you first. I had, like, total dibs.” 

“Guess I’m just popular.”

Tony sighs and kicks out a stool. “Sex later. Right now: c’mere, sit. Let’s figure this out.”

“I think we should revisit electric shocks,” Bruce says, taking a seat.

“Had another idea. I know you said triggering it yourself won’t result in anything new, but what if you don’t just like flip a switch or whatever it is you do? What if you go in there and think about the things that piss you off. Slowly work yourself up, then take a deep breath and come back down.”

“I’ve considered that.”

“And?”

“And honestly, being shocked seems a lot less exhausting.”

“Probably a lot less effective, too. This shit isn’t about your heart rate, Banner.” 

“You don’t say.” Bruce’s tone falls flat. Tony rolls his eyes. 

“Chist, you are so _touchy_.” 

“Thanks. I’m going to go work myself up into feeling some impotent rage now.”

“Gave you a good start, did I?”

“Barely a nudge.”

Tony clicks his tongue. “I could keep going, you know.”

“I know you could.” Bruce stands. “But don’t.” 

Bruce likes Tony. He doesn’t want to be angry with him.

He steps into the pod and the door closes behind him. 

Bruce sits and closes his eyes. Like meditation. Except he doesn’t focus on the air pulling into his body and the way it slowly fills his lungs, doesn’t imagine it settling into his core before being pushed back out, replaced. Bruce thinks of Ross wrapping his arm around Betty’s shoulder and guiding her away, of his apathetic eyes and greedy smile and the faint smell of cigars that always clung to his breath. He thinks of tanks and soldiers, of being restrained on a flat table in a white room and trying so hard to just let the sedative work, to let the doctor cut into him and open him up so he wouldn’t have to crush his skull beneath his forefinger and thumb, pluck off his limbs like petals from a flower. He thinks of the boy whose leg he amputated in Somalia, how the kid had screamed and screamed and how Bruce had just wanted him to _shut up._

He thinks of his Father, wrapping the end of a belt around his fist. _Monster. Freak._

His skin ripples. Bruce swallows and tries to pull it all back, to throw a sheet over it, to wrap it up and tuck it away deep inside of himself where he can pretend it isn’t there. He tries to remember the nearly blue sheen of Betty’s black hair, the warmth of a fresh mug of coffee being pushed into his palm, precise and sprawling math equations that always, always make sense. 

He’s on his knees, forehead pressed to the ground, fingers scrabbling against the floor and it’s never any different. It’s always like this, like he’s standing before a tidal wave or an avalanche, like his toes are hanging off the edge of a cliff and he’s slowly tipping forward until he’s gone just a little too far and the idea of going back again is a fucking joke because he’s _falling_ and the only way out is down.

“Bruce,” Tony says. Bruce manages to lift his head, but it’s hard to see anything with his vision going hazy at the edges. He thinks that Tony might be closer now, crouched down with his palm pressed flat to the glass. “Hey, come on, you’ve got this.”

Bruce chokes out a laugh because Tony actually believes that. He has faith, of all things. 

Bruce shakes his head. He tries to say no. Maybe he succeeds.

And then he’s gone.

 

*

 

_Getting out is meant to the hard part, but it’s on their way in that everything goes wrong._

_“They were tipped off,” Natasha says. Her tone is no different from the one she would use to tell Bruce that his tie is crooked. He stands beside her with his back to the wall, watching as she draws her gun from the holster on her hip, holding it close to her chest with the barrel pointing towards the ceiling._

_Bruce smiles thinly. “Wonderful.”_

_The microphone in his ear hums. Tony’s voice sounds hollow when he says, “Just stay frosty, Banner. You’re almost there.”_

_They nearly make it to their destination before the patrol catches them. Natasha slams her elbow into one of the guards’ noses, but doesn’t manage to take out his partner in time._

_The shot the man gets off is a lucky one. His aim is wild, too distracted by Natasha barrelling towards him to properly point and shoot. Bruce doesn’t like guns but understands them well enough to know that it’s harder than the movies make it look to hit a moving target._

_The guard misses Natasha but hits Bruce. The bullet passes straight through his shoulder, leaving a starburst of blood on the wall behind him. Natasha slams the man’s heard into the floor a moment later. Bruce knows this because he hears the sharp crunch of bone as he closes his eyes. He presses his palm flat to the wound, pushing to staunch the blood flow. The crack of the guard’s skull had sounded wet and pulpy, and Bruce wonders if Natasha has killed him._

_Bruce starts laughing as Natasha rips the shirt off the man’s limp body. She approaches him._

_“You have the worst luck,” he tells her. Natasha twists the shirt around his shoulder and ties it off tightly after checking to see if the bullet’s gone through. Black spots dance at the corner of Bruce’s vision, and he retches._

_“Come on, Banner,” she says. “I thought you were made of sterner stuff.”_

_“Sometimes,” Bruce says, and Natasha purses her full, red lips._

_Natasha says, “We can’t stop.”_

_“I know.”_

_“Are we going to be okay?”_

_Bruce’s pulse drums in his ears._

_He says, “Sure.”_

 

*

 

It’s always harder for Bruce to come back to himself when it’s anger or fear that pushes him over the edge. He wakes because he’s choking on his own vomit. He rolls and pukes all over the floor and hears the hissing sound of the door opening. 

“How have we not come up with Hulk proof pants yet? That is a fucking travesty, is what it is.”

Tony drops a blanket over his shoulders, kneels down and smoothes his palm over Bruce’s back. Bruce continues to retch until he’s dry heaving. 

“Big Guy and I went a few rounds,” Tony tells him. “I think it helped him cool off faster. We bonded. It was great.”

“Glad you had fun,” Bruce says, his voice dry and raw. He likes to think that he’s not really as bitter as he sounds.

Tony helps him stand and Bruce wishes he was too proud for this, that he could shrug off Tony’s hand and roll his shoulder like the touch offended him, make his way back to the elevator all on his own.

Tony says, “What do you want?” 

“Huh?”

“You. Wanting. Sleep? Food? Underwear?”

“Water,” Bruce says. His tongue sits in his mouth like a stone. His voice cracks. “Shower.”

“Okay then.” 

Tony brings him to his own room instead of Bruce’s. He gets Bruce to sit on the bed and goes into the on-suite bathroom. Bruce hears the sound of the shower running, and when Tony returns he’s holding a glass of water.

“You’re good at this,” Bruce says, taking the water and sipping at it.

“Hm?”

“Caretaking.”

“Learned from the best.”

Bruce isn’t sure if he should ask. He doesn’t have to. 

“Pepper. Back when I partied a little more, drank a _lot_ more. She was— well. She put up with a lot of my shit. At first it really disgusted her, I think.”

Bruce’s head is buzzing. He thinks, _she loves you_ , but doesn’t say it because Tony doesn’t need reassurance about that from him.

Tony says, “Do you need help? In the shower, I mean?”

Bruce doesn’t. He’s always done the come-down on his own, so many times now that he’s lost count. But when Tony takes the glass away from him his fingers brush against Bruce’s knuckles, and he’s warm and close and smells like oil and expensive cologne, and Bruce suddenly can’t bear the thought of being by himself in a small room. 

“If you’re offering,” Bruce says, looking up, damp curls tumbling over his forehead. 

Tony smirks. 

“Look at you,” he says. “Agent Romanov and Pep are spoiling you.”

For the most part, Tony just makes sure that Bruce doesn’t fall and die while he’s in the shower. He strips down but leaves his boxers on, which Bruce finds tremendously funny. He laughs helplessly into Tony’s neck as they step beneath the spray, and Tony adjusts his grip around Bruce’s waist.

“Christ, sorry for being a fucking gentleman.”

Bruce doesn’t move for a moment, just smiling against Tony’s skin as the warm water beats against his shoulders. 

Bruce scrubs soap through his hair and lets Tony wash his back. There are no lingering touches, no lips being pressed to his neck or teeth nipping at his ears. It’s not romantic or intimate, Tony’s touches so sterile that it reminds Bruce of when he was in the hospital as a child and the nurses had to help him bathe. 

But when Bruce loses his balance Tony grabs his hip and doesn’t let him fall. He rubs his hand up Bruce’s side and down again, catching Bruce’s eyes and smiling when he calls him clumsy, like it’s cute, like Bruce nearly slipping is something to be fond of. 

Tony is every little spectacular and broken thing that Bruce isn’t, and Bruce knows that he could hate Tony for that. He thinks it should make him angrier, Tony’s unwavering belief in him, his total disregard of the consequences that trail behind Bruce wherever he goes. Tony constructs beautiful suits of armour and sneers at the senate when they try to take them away. Bruce sometimes rips through his own skin and has to run and hunker down and eat cold food from tin cans because the governement wants to lock him in a cage. 

And it’s ridiculous, all of it, because Tony is only one man and he is wrong and one day he will fall and Bruce won’t be there to catch him because that is not what the Hulk does (what happened in New York had been an anomaly, a fluke, it didn’t absolve him of all the shit he’s caused).

“What’s wrong?” Tony asks, his lips moving against the back of Bruce’s neck.

“Nothing.”

“It’s never nothing with you.”

Bruce ducks his head, water dripping from his nose. “True.”

Tony drops his chin to Bruce’s shoulder. “Hey. Let’s go to bed.”

Bruce shrugs to make Tony back away. He turns, bracing his hand against the wall of the shower.

“Okay,” he says.

They kiss, slowly, just the wet slide of lips on lips.

Bruce is still damp and dripping when Tony drags him into bed, but Tony doesn’t seem to mind. They lie together on top of the sheets, Tony nudging his leg between Bruce’s, Bruce pressing his palm flat to the glow of the arc reactor just so he can feel the vibration of it resonate pass his skin. 

“Amazing,” Bruce says, dragging his thumb along the curved edge. Tony’s smile turns soft before he touches his mouth to the pulse point at Bruce’s throat. 

Bruce ducks his head to kiss him again, dipping his tongue into Tony’s mouth when his eyes flutter shut and he parts his lips in a sigh.

 

 

Bruce wakes when Pepper slips into bed, and he’s apologizing before he’s even opened his eyes.

“Hush,” she says. It’s too dark to see her but her tone makes him imagine her frowning, a little line forming between her perfectly shaped eyebrows. “Why are you sorry?”

She doesn’t give him a chance to answer (because this is your bed, this is your room and your boyfriend and I’m overstepping this whole having-casual-sex-with-half-the-people-in-the-building thing). Pepper nestles into bed between him and Tony, pressing her back to Tony’s chest. She kisses Bruce’s throat and rubs his arm until he falls back asleep.

 

 

The first time Bruce has sex with Tony is the next morning. He opens his eyes and Pepper’s gone and Tony is awake and watching him. 

“Sort of creepy,” Bruce says. Tony just grins and reaches for Bruce beneath the sheets.

Tony strips Bruce naked and bends him over, licks up the line of his spine and finger fucks him until Bruce’s legs are shaking.

 

 

Natasha shows up in the lab three days later when Bruce and Tony are due to run the next experiment.

“Afternoon,” she says, offering a little nod in greeting.

“Did Tony ask you to sub in?”

“No. He got called away and I offered.”

“Ah.” Bruce drums his fingers against his knuckles. “It bothers him. This.” He motions at the cage, the empty cell with three white walls, one clear.

“Stark can handle it.”

“Yeah, I know. But it still bothers him.”

Natasha shrugs. “Want to get started?”

“Sure.”

Bruce already has the system set up. He goes into the pod and sticks a small black puck into his mouth and holds two more in both of his hands. He nods to Natasha through the glass.

She hits the switch and electricity sizzles through him, flashing across his tongue and up his fingers. It makes Bruce’s vision fizzle out and sets his muscles on fire just before they begin to ripple and stretch and shred.

He wakes up feeling a little drowsy and sort of scattered. Natasha brings him clothes and coffee, sits crossed legged on the floor next to him and munches on a croissant as he shimmies into this pants without standing up. 

“Why are you doing this?” She asks.

Bruce looks at her, his shirt only half-buttoned. “That’s a strange thing for you to ask me, considering.”

“Still hung up on what happened on the helicarrier?”

“I’m still hung up on a lot of things.”

“You should work on that. It’s not healthy to fixate.”

Bruce looks down at his bare feet, his toes curling against the floor. He says, “I’m glad I didn’t kill you,” because he’s never told her that before and it feels like he should have.

Natasha snorts. “Same.”

“Imagine that.”

Natasha pops another hunk of bread into her mouth. “Why wasn’t I allowed to touch you?”

“Sorry?”

“Pepper and Tony both got you off.”

“Oh. Um. It was a timing thing, not a person thing. I’m um— ” Bruce pauses, not entirely sure how to finish that sentence. He’s a lot of things.

Natasha looks at him.

“Weird,” Bruce decides on. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

Natasha laughs. “I had four orgasms that night, Bruce. Insulted is not what I’m feeling.”

“Then what are you feeling?”

She steals a sip of Bruce’s coffee. He helps himself to a bite of her croissant. 

“I thought maybe it was some kind of penance. A way of –making it up to me, about what happened.”

“It wasn’t.”

Natasha nods. “I wouldn’t have liked that.”

“It was a few things. I was annoyed and tired and I find it relaxing, to focus on someone else.”

Bruce thinks for a moment of Betty, of milk-white thighs and long, slender fingers digging into his bed sheets.

He says, “You’re also the first person I’ve had sex with in awhile. I wanted to be cautious and unselfish about the whole thing.”

Natasha nods. “All right.”

They sit together in silence for a moment. It’s more comfortable than Bruce had expected it to be, sipping a coffee with Natasha by his side. 

She bumps her knee against Bruce’s leg and he thinks of the way she had carded her fingers through his hair, the intimacy of the gesture, how easily it came to her and how much it had surprised him. 

“Are you really expecting this to help?” She asks, waving at the room around them.

“I’m not expecting it to hurt.”

“Maybe you’re looking at it wrong. On the carrier you almost had it. You were fighting it off. But it was me, wasn’t it? You didn’t trust me, so it all fell apart.”

Bruce shifts against the glass and presses the back of his hand to his eyes.

“It wasn’t you. There was no stopping it.”

“You don’t know that.”

Bruce is quiet for a long time, and then says, “Your life.”

“What?”

“It’s what you said. You swore on your life that you would get me through what was happening.”

“And that made you angry?”

“No.”

When Natasha realizes he’s not going to offer anything more she says, “Given the circumstances, my life was sort of on the line.”

“Yeah,” Bruce says. What he doesn’t say is: but why was your life supposed to mean anything to me?

 

 

Later, when Bruce plays back the video feed of him changing, squinting at the readouts of his stats on the monitor, he thinks of Natasha. He pictures her with a shawl wrapped around her narrow shoulders, her hair falling against her face in loose curls. He thinks of how evenly she had met his gaze in Calcutta, how calm her voice had been and how annoyance had pricked at his skin like needles to the tips of his fingers when she had lied to him. 

_Just you and me._

He had scared her because he had wanted to _see_ her, wanted to rip apart her soft façade and peer at what she was hiding underneath. 

Natasha pulled a gun on him, and Bruce had smiled. He had straightened his spine and rubbed his hands together and thought _Ah, there you are._

 

*

 

_Natasha grabs his good arm and pulls and Bruce stumbles after her._

_The microphone in his ear buzzes. Tony says, “Banner?”_

_“Fine. I’m fine.”_

_“Right. Sure. Turn left and you should be in the control room in about two minutes.”_

_Natasha gets them there in one._

_“Your turn, Doctor,” she says, swiping a key card across the lock next to the door handle. It buzzes them through._

_“Where did you--?”_

_“I work for SHIELD.”_

_“Right. Okay.”_

_Bruce goes to the computer. The chair has been discarded in a hurry, thrown to the far side of the room, so Bruce crouches down on one knee and pulls the keyboard close. Natasha begins checking the exits._

_The door nearest to Bruce and the furthest away from Natasha starts to open. Bruce is on his feet the second after he hears the lock click, pounding his uninjured shoulder into the door and wincing when the person on the other side yells as their hand is caught against the edge of the door and the wall. Bruce braces his feet against the ground and pushes._

_The hand disappears. The door swings shut._

_“I need—oh, thanks.”_

_Natasha swipes the card again and the lock falls into place._

_Bruce goes back to the computers. He pushes his glasses up, smearing blood across the left lens._

_“Shit.”_

_Natasha pulls the glasses from his face and wipes them clean._

_“Thanks,” Bruce says._

_“Better get to work, Doctor.”_

 

*

 

Tony has an idea.

Bruce doesn’t think it’s a good one.

“So sex, like, totally zens you out, right?”

Bruce is trying to read. He sighs out his nose and looks up at Tony.

“What?”

“Sex. You like sex and you –you like the build up? You like having to wait for it, or pleasing the other person first. Why is that?”

Bruce shuts his book around his finger, marking his page. “You’ve been comparing notes with Natasha.”

“And Pepper. It’s kind of a thing that happens when you’re mutually fucking the same people.”

“You’re not having sex with Natasha. And it’s how I’ve always been.”

“Hm. But still, _I_ think it’s a control thing. Focusing on the other person to such an extreme extent: in control. Letting them pay you back: out of it.”

“That seems a little simplistic.”

“So,” Tony continues. “Why don’t we use that? Why don’t we push you until you’re about to break and then bring you back down?”

“Why, exactly, would that work?”

“Uh, why wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t be much different from everything else you try. We just stress you out physically or emotionally—”

“Via sex.”

“As I’ve said.”

“That doesn’t—”

“You’re comfortable with it. You like sex. Sex with me and Pep and Natasha –it’s safe.”

“Which is why it won’t work.”

“No, Banner, you’re not getting it: that’s _exactly_ why it will.”

 

 

Bruce talks it over with Pepper while she’s sitting his lap, rocking against him and bringing him close before sliding away completely. Her face is flushed, her hair falling loose from the bun at the base of her neck and spilling over shoulders.

“Are you afraid?”

Bruce is breathing heavily. He leans back into the pillows and closes his eyes. “Are you testing out Tony’s theory for him?”

“No. I thought this would be something you’d like.” She curls at his side and stokes her hand down his chest, over his hip, runs her fingers along the underside of his cock.

“That’s nice of you,” Bruce says, and absolutely means it.

Pepper nips at Bruce’s shoulder, the drag of her teeth forming into a quick smile. “Tony mentioned something about bringing a bed into the containment pod. Quick excess if you need it.”

“That—that seems ridiculous, somehow.”

“Well. If you’re worried.”

“Of course I’m worried.”

“I know.” Pepper kisses his cheek. “You’re always worried.”

Bruce pulls her hand away from his lap. “Don’t. This matters. Don’t act like—”

“I’m not.” Pepper sits up. “Don’t treat me like an outsider, Bruce. I know who you are just as well as Tony or Natasha. Do you think that I don’t read the same files that Tony reads? That I don’t watch the footage?”

Bruce says nothing.

“You don’t have to try out Tony’s plan and if you don’t want to and I don’t have to be there for it if you do. But I don’t need you to protect me from yourself, Bruce. And I don’t want it.”

“I like what I have with you, and with Natasha and Tony. I don’t—if this doesn’t work—”

“Why would it change anything if it doesn’t?”

“It will change things for me. I want to keep this. I want to trust myself with it.”

“I trust you,” Pepper says, and she’s crawling back into his lap now. “Tony trusts you.”

“Tony’s an idiot.”

“Only about some things.” She stokes his face. “Natasha’s trying. She likes you, Bruce. It would be good for her, too.”

“She’s afraid of me.”

“Does that bother you?”

Bruce doesn’t know what to say to that because the answer is neither yes or no. He hates that Tony completely covers his eyes and plugs his ears to what Bruce is and it worries him that Pepper seems to just accept it so readily, and yet he doesn’t know what he would do if they acted any differently towards him.

He likes that Natasha is afraid. Bruce understands fear. It makes him feel secure and maintained, like there’s someone close by who _gets it_. But sometimes he thinks of the way Natasha had pulled a gun on him so quickly, contrasting it against the memory of her fingers rubbing a slow circle into the back of his neck, and Bruce _aches_ deep in his chest.

“Do you want me to be afraid?” Pepper asks him quietly.

“No,” Bruce says.

Pepper takes Bruce into her hand and strokes him until he’s hard again. She sinks on top of him and leans back, one hand on Bruce’s shoulder to steady herself.

“Then trust me, Bruce,” she says. “Trust us.”

 _Yes, yes, yes,_ tumbles from Bruce’s mouth.

 

 

HYDRA, as it turns out, has a very skilled hacker on their hands, someone good enough to successfully pick through Tony’s firewall and force JARVIS to blip out for nearly five minutes as a small SQAUT team invades the tower.

Bruce is in the lab at the time, fiddling with the microphone in his ear with one hand and pushing his glasses up his nose with the heel of the other. The Avengers are out there hunting down a person of interest that’s been on SHIELD’s shit-list of awhile now. Bruce is keeping tabs on his movements, warning the others when a new group of mercenaries are closing in around them. 

JARVIS says, “Doctor Banner, the Tower is—” and fizzles out.

Bruce only wastes three seconds blinking at the computer screen before bolting to his feet, tucking the laptop beneath his arm as he goes. He locks himself in the containment pod, smiling sheepishly at the masked men with guns when they burst into the lab.

“JARVIS?” Bruce says.

Static, a hiss over the speakers and a jumble of indecipherable words, and then: “Apologies, Doctor Banner, the intruders managed to upload a virus onto my system. It took a moment to dispose of.”

“Could you lock all the data down?”

“Already done, Doctor.”

Bruce touches the microphone in his ear.

“How close are you guys to finishing up?” Bruce asks. The men outside the glass fan out, spreading through the lab. Two break away and approach the pod.

“Why?” Clint asks. 

“I’m being attacked at headquarters.”

“Fucking _what_?” Tony’s voice is loud enough to raise static on the line. Bruce winces.

“It’s fine. I’m in the pod. JARVIS was out for a minute but he’s back now and the files are locked. Someone might want to come and handle this, though.”

Clint says, “And you aren’t taking care of it because…?”

“Um. Do you want the building to stay standing?”

“Point.”

Steve cuts in. “Black Widow and I are on our way. Hold tight.”

Tony says something about how he could get there faster and argues with Steve about it over the next few minutes. Thor laughs in the background. Bruce isn’t really paying attention because the men are examining the equipment and placing small explosives outside the door to the pod.

Bruce sits down, crossing his legs, folding his hands together in his lap. The explosion is small and controlled and doesn’t do a damn thing, as he expected. JARVIS pipes up when one of the men begins to poke around the chemicals, making him jump and spin around. 

Bruce smiles.

“It’s taking you all this long to dispose of these guys? Seriously?”

Tony grunts. He must be in the middle of something. 

Clint says, “Eat me, Banner.” 

“Open the door or we smash all of this!” Someone outside the pod screams, pounding their palm against the glass.

Bruce shrugs. “Everything on the computers is backed up and Tony Stark is a billionaire. Be my guest.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Tony says. “Only getting one side of this conversation, but do not encourage them to trash the place, Bruce.”

Bruce is still sitting on the floor when Natasha and Steve arrive. They have the room cleared within four minutes, and when they’re finished Steve knocks at the door to the pod, like he’s a gentleman coming over for dinner with a bottle of wine tucked beneath his elbow. He grins at Bruce through the glass.

“Held up okay, Doctor Banner?”

Bruce stands and exits the room.

“Yeah. Thanks.” 

Natasha ties off the last man and drags him towards the pile of people in the corner. There’s a smudge of dirt across her forehead. 

“You need to learn how to defend yourself,” she says.

Bruce sets down his laptop. “I know some martial arts. Offensive moves, mostly, but.”

There is a pause, and a sudden sharpness to Natasha’s smile. 

“Is that so, Doctor?”

Steve offers Bruce a sympathetic look.

 

 

Two hours later, Bruce ends up in the gym with Natasha. 

“Care to show me what you know?”

“Are you just looking for an excuse to kick my ass?”

“Please, as if I’d ever need one.”

Natasha allows Bruce to take her arm and twist it behind her back, to kick her legs out from under her and pin her to the floor. When she attacks him she moves slowly, carefully, gives Bruce the time he needs to block her or side-step out of the way. He feels clumsy and bumbling as he watches her, doesn’t miss just how easily she manoeuvres around his blows, pivoting gracefully on the balls of her feet.

He stops when his heart rate climbs a little too high, touches two fingers to his wrist and counts as Natasha watches him.

“You could be a dancer,” he says.

“I was.”

Bruce looks up at her, blinking, but she offers nothing more.

“Felling okay?”

“Hm?”

“Haven’t pushed yourself too hard?”

“No, I’m—”

Natasha is a blur of motion. Her hands are on his shoulders and her legs are around his neck and Bruce ends up on his back with Natasha’s knees on either side of his head. She’s grinning, her hair damp and clinging to her face, her lips. 

“Too slow,” she says. “Work on that.” 

She presses her mouth to his.

“Maybe this was my plan all along,” Bruce says, gasps it, really, when she pulls away.

“That desperate to have me back on top?”

“I like a woman who takes charge.”

They fuck on the floor. Bruce pushes his hands beneath Natasha’s shirt, tugging up her bra and palming her breasts as she sinks down on top of him. 

Afterwards, they lie side by side on the mats.

“Stark told me about his plan,” Natasha says.

“Would you be up for it?”

“An orgy?” Natasha shrugs. “Why not?”

“Do four people make an orgy?”

Natasha reaches for her phone and thumbs at the screen. She makes a disappointed sound.

“Internet says five and up.”

“Shame.”

“Hmm. Do you want me there?”

Natasha rolls onto her side. She pushes herself up on her elbow and cradles her head in her open palm. She speaks to Bruce like this is a normal post-sex conversation, like they’re both still swaddled in blankets and whispering to each other in the dark.

“I want you there,” Bruce says. “But only if _you_ want to be there.”

“I’ll make some room on my schedule.”

 

 

Tony says, “Should we work out a safeword or something?”

Bruce pretends to think about it. “How about ‘stop’?”

“Little uncreative, but sure.”

 

*

 

_Natasha plugs in a USB drive into the computer that does nearly all the work for them. It sifts through the files in minutes, pinging the ones it deems potentially important. Bruce only has to choose between them._

_He allows himself more time than he should to read about the incarceration of Emil Blonsky. Most of the documents on him are coded, but Bruce can decipher enough of the lingo to know that Blonsky has been successfully held in the same place for over two years now, likely a bunker deep underground that was originally built to hold the Hulk. Bruce wonders what Ross has learned in that time. What he’s tried to recreate with the data._

_No sympathy swells in Bruce’s chest, but neither does disgust or anger. There’s only a churning sensation deep down in the pit of his stomach, a sense of foreboding settling into his guts._

__I should have killed him, _Bruce thinks (it will only strike him later that he used the word ‘I’ and not ‘the Hulk’)._ I should have just killed him, it would have been better than— __

_“Bruce,” Natasha says. She touches the back of his hand. He curls his fingers into his fist before he looks to see whether or not they had been shaking._

_“Sorry,” he says. “Just a few more minutes and we’ll be done.”_

_Natasha rubs her thumb against his knuckles and doesn’t reply. Bruce tries to meet her eyes but she’s already turned her head away._

_“How much longer?”_

_“Not very.”_

_Bruce’s heart hammers in his chest, echoing through his skull and in his ears. It makes him think of a countdown._

 

*

 

Tony fucks him slowly, leaning over Bruce and drawing his legs up against his chest. The light from the arc reactor curves between them, and they’re close enough that Bruce can feel the hum of it against his skin without touching. 

Bruce had only been half-hard when Tony pushed into him, his cock slick and chilled from a fistful of lube. Bruce lifted an eyebrow and smiled in a way that was almost, but not quite, a smirk, wondering if he was a good enough liar to fool Tony into thinking that he wasn’t afraid.

“Eager much?” He asked.

Tony only grinned in response, a quick flash of white teeth in the dark. 

Tony arches his back and rolls his hips forward, the head of his cock grinding against Bruce’s prostate. Bruce licks his lips, running his hands smoothly over silk sheets before curling his fingers into them.

“ _Ah…_ ” 

Tony’s thrusts becomes shallow, the curve of his mouth sharp and smug. Bruce knows that Tony’s waiting for the moment when the push-pull of his cock becomes too much and not enough. Tony wants Bruce to crumble, for Bruce to ask for more before Tony is willing to give it to him.

Bruce doesn’t say a word, but his eyelashes flutter and his skull rocks back against the headboard. Tony draws his teeth over Bruce’s bared throat, the stubble on his jaw crackling against sensitive skin. Bruce’s mouth falls open, wet and red, and Tony moves away, dropping a hand to the mattress on either-side of Bruce’s head before jackknifing into him. 

A moan rips itself from Bruce’s throat. He reaches down towards his cock but Tony takes his hand, hushing him when Bruce keens in protest. He draws two grasping fingers into his mouth, sucking them back on his tongue.

Bruce doesn’t know when Natasha and Pepper entered the room, but when he shifts against the mattress and his eyes drift from Tony’s face to his shoulder, he sees them both standing at the end of the bed, arms curved around each other and watching. 

Natasha meets Bruce’s gaze as she unzips Pepper’s dress, pulling it off her shoulders and letting it crumple to the floor. She sweeps the hair away from of Pepper’s neck, settling her lips there instead as she unhooks Pepper’s bra and pushes down her underwear. She sinks a finger into Pepper’s and pulls away, asking Bruce how badly he would like a taste before helping herself. 

Pepper smiles at Natasha fondly and says, “Don’t tease him,” before climbing into bed. Natasha sheds her clothes and follows after.

“Hey you,” Tony says, greeting Pepper with a kiss. He winks at Natasha and she rolls her eyes back at him.

“How’s it going Bruce?” She asks as Tony pulls out of him.

“Oh. You know,” Bruce says. His voice comes out as a croak. 

Tony rolls Bruce over, guiding him onto his hands and knees. Natasha curls her fingers around the back of his neck, directing him towards the space between her long, open legs. Pepper settles in behind her, one hand cupped to Natasha’s breast, the other sliding downwards, parting the lips of her cunt and easing back the hood of flesh over her clit.

“Is this what you want?” Tony asks, curved against his back, his breath hot and damp against the shell of Bruce’s ear. He ruts against Bruce’s ass without entering him.

“Yes,” Bruce gasps. Saliva is building on his tongue and his heart is pounding in his chest and ears and cock. “ _Yes._ ”

Tony rocks into him again as Bruce flattens his tongue against the bead of Natasha’s clit. The taste alone is almost too much, sharp and heady and consuming. Bruce tries to open her up with his lips, to rub his tongue against her in just the way that makes her shiver, but Tony pounds into him again and again, and Bruce loses his concentration on anything more than the heat in his gut, the ache between his legs. 

Bruce turns his face away from Natasha, gasping, mouthing a silent moan into her hip. He wants to apologize to her because he can’t, he _can’t_ , not with Tony’s cock buried inside him, not with Pepper moaning at the sight of them and Natasha’s hands pulling at Bruce’s hair, like she wants to draw him closer, like what he’s giving her isn’t enough.

“That’s it,” Tony says, his voice low and heated. “Come on, come on Bruce, you must be aching for it.”

Bruce feels like he’s going to shake out of his skin. Sweat stings at his eyes and drips from the tip of his nose. His cock is flushed and drizzling against his stomach and he can’t stop thinking about how good just one stroke would be, how perfect it would feel to thrust forward and into Natasha.

Something wild inside of him uncoils, breaks free from his desire and twists tightly in his chest.

Bruce’s eyes snap open. 

“Wait,” Bruce says, choking on the word. “Just—just wait. _Don’t—_.”

“Bruce.” Tony pulls out and comes back. Bruce can feel the smooth, cool disc of the arc reactor pulse against his spine. “It’s okay, it’s fine. Just us, right?” 

Bruce lifts his head. Natasha is staring at him, her eyes wide and alert but steady on his face. 

“Deep breaths, Doctor,” she says. 

Bruce shakes his head. He doesn’t understand what she’s talking about. 

Natasha parts her lips and inhales, and Bruce is suddenly aware of the ringing in his ears, the tightness in his chest and throat. Bruce watches the slight flare of her nostrils, the gentle rise and fall of her breasts. Tony sighs against his neck, long and slow, and when Bruce closes his eyes and forces down a gulp of air it’s Pepper who reaches for him. She frames his face in her hands, thumbs stroking against his cheekbones and around the hollows of his eyes.

“Once more,” she tells him, and Bruce breathes again.

The thing that lives inside of Bruce’s skin, that’s locked into his joints and knitted between muscle and bone, stirs and doesn’t settle. But it also doesn’t break free, doesn’t crack Bruce’s ribs open from the inside out and leave him bleeding and raw. It sits within him, tucked away in the space behind his heart, beating and alive but not outside of Bruce’s control.

Bruce’s shoulders slump. _Safe,_ he remembers. He’s safe.

“Do you want to stop?” Tony asks.

Bruce turns his head to look at him. His vision is still a little hazy, dark or green around the edges, but Tony is there, calm and solid and waiting. 

“No,” Bruce says. “But you need to fuck me harder.”

Time moves forward at a crawl, and there comes a moment when Bruce is lost, when he’s writhing on Tony’s dick, shuddering, and he opens his mouth to say _please_ but Pepper places two fingers on his tongue to stop him. Tony mutters encouragements into his back, meaningless little things that have Bruce panting all the same. Natasha pushes her hands through his sweat-soaked hair.

“You’re close,” Tony says. “I know you are.”

Bruce isn’t able to agree. Pepper strokes the inside of his cheek, her other hand working between Natasha’s legs.

“Bruce?” Natasha says. He tries to look at her, his vision swimming. She waits until their eyes lock before reaching down, fingertips ghosting over Bruce’s cock.

“Okay?” Pepper asks.

Bruce nods.

Pepper smiles, pulling her fingers away and then nudging Bruce to turn his head towards Tony for a kiss. Natasha curls her fingers around him as Tony’s tongue slips pass Bruce’s teeth and into his mouth.

Bruce shudders apart between them.

Tony’s arm remains a firm and confronting band across Bruce’s chest as he pulls out. He’s still hard but doesn’t fuck into Bruce as he shudders through his orgasm, only rubs his rough cheek against Bruce’s shoulder and presses a hand flat to his heart, waiting for it to slow before moving away.

“Bruce?” Pepper says, smoothing her hand over his hip as he rolls onto his side.

“I think you broke me,” Bruce says, shifting his leg forward as Tony drags a cloth over his thighs and stomach. Natasha settles down next to him.

“You don’t seem broken,” she says.

Pepper and Tony drift towards the end of the bed as Natasha lights a cigarette. Bruce presses his face into a pillow, eyes half-lidded. He watches Natasha’s mouth and listens to Pepper’s breathy little sighs and Tony’s murmurs of approval. He feels like a switch has been flicked in his head, light and calm and sort of buzzed.

“Your eyes are green,” Natasha says, running the back of her fingers along Bruce’s jaw. Her hair is damp with sweat, frizzing up a little from the heat.

Bruce smiles, affection swelling in his chest. “So are yours.”

Natasha touches the filter of the cigarette to his lips. Bruce opens his mouth and inhales. 

 

*

 

_Two steps out the door and the alarm goes off._

_Natasha sighs out her nose, looking down the hallway and then over her shoulder. She’s frowning just a little, like this is nothing more than a minor set-back, something she’ll complain to Clint about later over a beer. But Bruce knows Natasha. Knows her better than she probably likes. Her jaw is clenched tight, her eyes darting about quickly as she considers their options. She’s worried because Bruce is injured and tense, because now they have to run and be chased and maybe he won’t be able to hold it together._

_Bruce’s shoulder throbs. Blood has soaked through the shirt that Natasha used as a tourniquet and is beginning to trail down his arm in thin, red lines. The sensation doesn’t quite tickle, but it’s distracting enough that Bruce wants to scrubs his arm raw to make it stop. The alarm shrieks overhead and drowns out the sound of Tony’s voice._

_He wants to reassure Natasha. To tell her that he’s fine. But the words stick in his throat._

 

*

 

“So,” Tony says. “Success?”

It’s been over a day. Bruce is surprised Tony managed to last this long without asking. 

Bruce makes a so-so gesture with his hand. Tony frowns.

Bruce says, “It was great, don’t get me wrong but… I don’t know. It was—different.”

“Explain it to me.”

“My heart rate was high enough.”

“Yeah, I figured. But you said that doesn’t always set it off anymore anyways, right?”

“No, but still. It’s a good sign.”

Bruce pauses. He turns away from the computer screen, taking off his glasses so he can meet Tony’s eyes without a barrier sitting between them.

“It was there, but it was still part of me. It wasn’t going to just burst out without warning. I, I had a grip on it. I think. Maybe.”

Tony grins, a quick flash of white teeth. He claps a hand to Bruce’s shoulder and gives him a shake. “Sounds like progress.”

 

*

 

And this is it. This is the moment when Bruce fails, when it’s all riding on him and the illusion of control and he cracks and shatters because it’s all a fucking lie. Because no matter how well of a grip he has on it one day that dictates nothing of the days or weeks or months to follow. Ropes fray and chains rust and grips weaken and Bruce knows this, he _knows_ , but he had wanted so badly for it to be different, just this once.

The microphone in his ear crackles, the volume on Tony’s end cranked so Bruce can hear him over the piercing ring of the alarm. “Bruce?”

Natasha is taking Bruce’s good arm and pulling it over her shoulders. 

“We can’t stay here,” she says.

“You need to get away.”

“So do you. If you change now our cover will be blown.”

“It’s already blown—”

“The military suspecting SHIELD is one thing. If you Hulk out now Ross has his excuse. He gets to point the finger and say that you’re stealing classified documents, you’re not on a leash like SHIELD promised. He’ll say this was a direct attack against him and this is the exact reason why you need to be locked away—”

“I _know_.” The words come out low and rough, in a voice that Bruce nearly doesn’t recognize as his own.

“Then fucking move, Banner.”

“As the lady commands, Bruce,” Tony says. “You’re not far out from the exit. You’ll make it.”

Natasha drags him down the hallway, her grip tight on his wrist. Bruce’s mouth is dry and his bones feel like heated rods beneath his skin. He feels like he did the moment before Natasha tasered him in the pod, tensed and braced for the blow but still not ready for what was about to happen.

Natasha flings him against the wall after they round the next corner, away from the four men blocking their path. He hits the concrete with his shoulder, the one that’s a bleeding, gaping mess, and _green_ blurs in his vision.

Someone is screaming at them to get the fuck down. Bruce hears the words, but they don’t register. He’s pushing his hand against his shoulder, against the ruined shirt and bullet wound beneath it. He’s thinking _it’s fine, I’m fine,_ and trying to distract himself from the men in riot gear, from Natasha curving between them and sending one face-first into the floor.

Tony says, “We’re ready for pick up whenever you guys are.”

“Be right there,” Natasha says. She sounds a little out of breath.

“Bruce?” Tony. “Hey, talk to me.”

“You’d better have a tranq ready,” Bruce says. His tongue feels too big for his mouth, prickles like a limb does after it’s fallen asleep. 

“Got your name on it. Hey. You freaking out?”

“Getting a bit stressed.”

“List the bones in the human hand.”

Yells and bullets and the splash of fresh blood on the wall. Bruce blinks. “What?”

“C’mon, Bruce. Focus. List them.” 

Bruce says, “Interphalangeal joint.”

Natasha grabs someone’s wrist and twists—

“Metacarpophalangeal joint.”

—steals their gun and jams it into another soldier’s jaw—

“Distal phalanx.”

—and there are teeth on the floor, white bits of enamel speckled with blood, clattering against Bruce’s shoes—

“Middle phalanx.”

Natasha spins, she dances, she breaks a man’s neck and snaps another’s arm at the elbow.

Bruce hears the crack and closes his eyes. He’s not squeamish or queasy by nature, but the sight of gleaming, white bone piercing through skin, unaligned and wrong and out of place with the rest of his body, makes his stomach clench and roll.

“Bruce.”

Natasha is standing in front of him. There’s a smear of red against her cheek and Bruce wants to wipe it away, wants to wring the neck of the person who put it there.

She grips his chin, nails biting into his jaw.

“I need you with me, Bruce.”

“You’re hurt.”

Natasha makes a soft _pff_ sound.

“You’re scared,” he says, because she can’t scoff at that.

“Yeah well, you can be a scary guy.”

Bruce pushes himself away from the wall. Natasha takes his arm again.

“You good to run?” Natasha asks.

Bruce has run through forests in bare feet. He’s scampered across rocky beaches and sheets of ice, scraped his heels raw and broken his toes, limped on for miles before collapsing into alleyways. 

“Always am,” Bruce says.

He stumbles after her, off-balance by the weight of his useless arm. He thinks of his blood bubbling, of his skin peeling off in flakes.

(A long time ago he watched a documentary on butterflies and learned that when the time comes for a monarch caterpillar to change into a chrysalis, it hangs upside down from a branch and its skin slowly splits open. The flesh beneath is a bright, lime green.

That’s not what happens to Bruce when he changes. He knows this, but it’s what he thinks of anyways, of his skin unravelling along his spine as the Hulk curls outwards from his back.)

“Keep up,” Natasha says. “Bruce. Stay with me.”

And God, Bruce is trying.

It’s raining outside, pouring, and it pounds against Bruce like needles. He trails blindly after Natasha, his glasses blurred with water. She pushes Bruce out in front of her, and someone grabs his wrist and drags him into the helicopter.

“Hey big guy, how’d it go?”

Tony’s voice, resonating from his own throat and echoing through the microphone in Bruce’s ear. Bruce rips the mic out, drags his fingers from his ear up to his hair and starts pulling. His heart is hammering and his throat is closing in on itself and where the _fuck_ is that tranquilizer

“It’s okay,” Tony says, his hands settling on Bruce’s shaking shoulders. “Bruce. It’s fine, you’re fine.”

“ _Stark._ ” Natasha, her voice breathy and cracking. Wonderful, beautiful, Natasha, hard and immobile and so, so afraid. 

Bruce is shaking his head _no no no_ because Tony can’t do this, he _can’t_. He isn’t allowed to make this decision

“Bruce. Bruce, don’t go.”

Bruce curls in on himself, knees up, arms criss-crossing across his chest. His shoulder throbs with the movement and blood pools in the elbow of his sleeve.

“Bruce?” Natasha says, and he thinks of her lying on her stomach in the helicarrier. He thinks of how little her words had meant to him then, and it strikes him as strange, how it seems like that happened a very long time ago.

She touches the back of his neck and he bows his head to make it easier for her to stroke his hair. He leans into the warm line of Tony’s body and thinks of Pepper’s smooth hands, her long fingers. _I trust you._

He gasps for air like a man half-drowned, clawing his way back up to the surface.

 

 

It’s Pepper that sleeps beside him that night on the couch, her hand tucked between the curve of his elbow and his body, her head resting on his chest. She asks if it hurts and it takes Bruce a long moment to understand that she’s referring to his shoulder, cleaned and sewed and neatly bandaged.

“Forgot all about it,” Bruce says.

Pepper tips her head back, kissing at the underside of his jaw. “You would.”

Bruce hadn’t clung to Tony and Natasha the entire ride back. He had moved away when their arms and hands became too confining, when the pocket of air against Tony’s neck turned warm. He sat alone on the bench, and Natasha grabbed Tony when he tried to follow, shook her head and looked at Bruce and asked if he was okay with seeing a medic or not.

Reluctantly, Bruce had nodded, good sense winning out over the need to not be touched.

Strangely, he didn’t mind when Pepper came to him hours later. Bruce hadn’t wanted Tony or Natasha but Pepper had been unattached from the mission, had been waiting and worried and Bruce likes that his presence comforts her, that he can give her something back for her company.

Pepper says, “I’m glad you’re okay. All of you.”

Bruce closes his eyes. “And what about the next time?”

“Why does next time have to be any different?”

Bruce isn’t sure how to answer that without being cruel or patronizing, so he doesn’t.

Pepper huffs out a laugh. “Ever hear the phrase ‘hope for the best, prepare for the worst’?”

“That easy, hm?

“No,” Pepper says, and her voice is soft and sad. “It’s not easy at all.”

And Pepper probably understands that better than any of them, because she loves Tony and cares about Natasha and has these little, affection smiles for Bruce, and she’s always waiting for her important people to come back to her, never knowing whether or not they will. 

“You have to take it one day at a time, Bruce,” she says. “You’ll go crazy otherwise.

Bruce breathes in the scent of her hair, and presses his lips against her forehead. 

“I’ll give it a shot.”

 

 

After the briefing with Fury, Bruce corners Tony in the hallway. 

“I’m angry with you,” Bruce tells him. 

Tony lifts both his eyebrows, makes a show of looking Bruce over, up and down. “Well, obviously not _that_ angry.”

Bruce stares at him. Torny shurgs.

“What? It worked.” 

“Not the point.”

“Uh. Kind of is? I think.”

Bruce exhales out his nose, slowly, and then fists his hands into Tony’s collar, slamming him back against the wall. The skin beneath his nails whitens, but Bruce’s pulse remains a firm and steady beat in his ears. 

“It’s not. Your. _Call_. You don’t just get to decide otherwise when I’m telling you no. If I can’t fucking trust you then what is even the point of—of any of this?”

Tony’s lips flatten into a thin line. His brows pull together and his jaw works and Bruce resists the urge to shake him.

It’s a surprise when Tony stays quiet, when he remains still and allows Bruce to keep him pinned without a fight. He lifts his hand to curl his fingers around Bruce’s wrist. He doesn’t squeeze, and his fingers are too high up for him to be measuring Bruce’s pulse. 

“Hey,” Tony says. Bruce’s eyes flicker back up to his face.

Tony isn’t smiling. He doesn’t roll his eyes or sigh or scoff, doesn’t joke or try to fast-talk his way out of trouble. He just says, “Okay,” like it’s all as simple as that.

Bruce stares at him for a long time. When he drops his arms it’s so he can press his brow to the curve of Tony’s shoulder, his hands falling to drag across Tony’s sides and hips. 

Tony doesn’t touch him again which is—it’s perfect. He tilts his head until his mouth is in Bruce’s hair.

“It was a dick move,” Tony says. 

“Very.”

“I would have gone through with the tranq if you had actually starting going green, you know.”

“Only after it was too late, you mean?”

A pause. And then quietly, mouthed against Bruce’s scalp: “Sorry.”

Bruce pulls away and scrubs at his face. “Don’t do it again. We talk about it first.”

“Fine by me.”

“You’d better mean that.”

“Absolutely.” 

 

 

Bruce lets the Hulk out by choice.

Tony has filled the pod with tree stumps and boulders, ugly furniture that makes satisfying, crunching noises when the Hulk snaps them in half or heaves them at the walls. 

When the Hulk has thoroughly broken everything Iron Man steps in, kicking off from the edges of the room and darting about as the Hulk lumbers after him, hands outstretched, arms flailing. 

Bruce watches the recording afterwards, tired and frumpy with his glasses pushed up into his hair. His keeps his feet planted flat on the ground to stop himself from swaying.

“Is that… are you playing tag?” He asks.

Tony pushes a sweater at him. “He seemed to like it. Looked happy, anyways.”

“Um.” Bruce squints at the Hulk on screen as he roars and bares his teeth. “You think?”

“He was laughing,” Natasha says. She was there when Bruce woke up and he doesn’t know when she joined them, but he’s glad that she stayed. It makes something warm and alive curl in his chest, the thought that she watched and waited from him to come back. 

She offers Bruce a private little smirk, the corner of her mouth lifting. Her arms are crossed, but her shoulders are relaxed, her posture calm and open. “How do you feel?”

Bruce feels like he’s been shattered and pieced back together, like all the shards fit perfectly and nothing’s been left behind. It’s an uncomfortable prickle beneath his skin, but not overwhelming or painful, and maybe in time the edges will wear down, will slot together smoothly without cutting. 

Bruce smiles.

“Likewise,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> And here is where I fear my story isn't clear enough. In case of confusion: the side story in italics all occurs after Bruce and Tony have had their talk about their little foursome with Nat and Pepper. The italics stop being used because one story catches up to the other. 
> 
> Thanks for reading. Critique is always accepted.


End file.
